Qualcomm and Samsung Expand Partnership as Snapdragon Powers New Galaxy Devices Across Phones, Watches, and Smart Glasses

Qualcomm and Samsung are deepening their long-running partnership, with Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips now powering Samsung's latest lineup across smartphones, wearables, and intelligent eyewear. Announced at Samsung Unpacked, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Mobile Platform for Galaxy, Snapdragon Wear Elite, and Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 will run the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, Z Fold8, Z Flip8, Galaxy Watch9, Galaxy Watch Ultra21, and Samsung's new intelligent eyewear.

The idea driving this rollout is a unified AI experience across all these device categories, letting Snapdragon chips handle heavy AI processing directly on each device while also enabling smoother connectivity between them, so the AI experience feels consistent and context-aware whether someone's using their phone, watch, or glasses, and can adapt in real time to what the user is doing.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon framed this as part of a broader shift toward AI built directly into the personal devices people use throughout the day, saying the partnership with Samsung is helping enable more natural, context-aware AI across the Galaxy lineup, building on nearly three decades of collaboration between the two companies. Won-joon Choi, president and COO of Samsung's Mobile Experience business, said the new Galaxy lineup reflects close engineering work between the two companies to optimize Snapdragon chips f...